Search for Inner Zag starts with the right outfit
Our journey began, as most chick trips do, as an excellent excuse to shop.
My friend, Becky Nappi, wanted to become a true Gonzaga fan. There was only one place to begin.
I took her to one of my favorite athletic apparel shops and marched her right up to the Tommy Hilfiger rack. Immediately, she found it: the perfect blazing red pullover, labeled “Gonzaga.”
I, on the other hand, rifled past all the fleeces and T-shirts that matched those already hanging in my closet. I landed on a fitted navy blue warm-up jacket. But what to go under it? I pulled a sleek navy halter top, more GU Bomb Squad than moi, from the rack.
“Go for it,” Becky breathed. A girl turns 50 only once.
So that’s how we find ourselves, posed in Zags navy and red, on the front page of your newspaper this morning, counting down the final days of our first half-century and packing for the road trip of our lives.
Wednesday we head off to Tucson, the opening leg in what we hope becomes a three-week extravaganza – a trip with the Gonzaga University men’s basketball team clear through the NCAA tournament – and a chance to celebrate our spring birthdays with all the escapism and glee that any trip to the Big Dance entails.
Along the way, I’ll be introducing Becky to the secrets of the inner Zags sanctum. Although she’s also a GU alum, as well as the wife of a Gonzaga University faculty member and a cradle Catholic, she’s attended only two basketball games in her life. I, thanks to my husband’s foresight, have been sitting in season-ticket seats for years. Every Thursday and Saturday I possibly can, I trek to The Kennel to join 6,000 screaming Zags fans.
This trip I’ll introduce Becky to them all – from the young Kokanee-soaked Kennel Club members with red-painted torsos to the lovable Old Dogs with ball caps tucked over their bald spots. We’ll probe the mystery of why Spike the Bulldog sometimes seems to be a guy, and other nights surely must be a girl. With luck, we’ll also track down 80-year-old Emma Wasson, GU’s most visible fan and team icon for 33 years, and share her memories.
As we travel, we’ll interview Zags fans, searching for their tales of devotion and delight. We’re calling this trip, and the series we’re launching today, “ZagQuest.” One of our readers suggested we name it “This Is Our Midlife Crisis.”
She’s probably right.
We invite you along for the ride. Watch for our next column on Wednesday.
In the meantime, every Zag’s journey begins at a different point. Here are our back stories.
Becky Nappi: In college, I attended only one GU game. I don’t remember a basket of it. My college years coincided with my poet Sylvia Plath years, lots of dark moods, deep thoughts and too much worry about the future. I partied plenty, but I studied a lot, too, and I never regret that.
One time, Joni Mitchell was in concert in Seattle, but I didn’t dare skip a day of classes to see her. I regret that now. During spring breaks, I worked in the library. One day in the stacks of then-Crosby Library, I read a short biography of Plath. The writer said too bad she didn’t hold on until her 30s. The depression would have lifted and she might not have killed herself.
And if she had only held out to 50! As I stare down the half-century mark, I relish not dwelling too long in deep thoughts. The dark moods, when they come, now have external reasons, like not getting enough sleep. I’m going to the Big Dance to resurrect that Inner Zag who never hooted and howled and jumped up and down at basketball games and hugged the fan next to me and then went out for beers afterward at the Bulldog. That Inner Zag who worried too much about what the future would bring not realizing the future would arrive so quickly.
It’s here. And now, I’m dancing as fast as I can to Tucson.
Jamie Neely: I’m married to a basketball addict, neither a GU alum nor a Catholic, who discovered this team soon after we moved to Spokane in 1983. One particular player caught his eye: His name was John Stockton.
Soon we had season tickets, and our daughters frequently accompanied their dad to the games. But it really wasn’t until Quentin Hall showed up that I, like much of the rest of Spokane, started falling for this team.
Quentin’s face lighted up like Bahamian sunshine as he trash-talked and ran and exulted his way up and down the court. And soon I started noticing his appealing teammates – Mike Nilson, Matt Santangelo, and Richie Frahm. I’ve rarely given up my seat since.
Through the years, our family’s watched the Zags play in Spokane and Seattle, in San Diego, Santa Clara and Maui. Once we watched them compete in an NCAA tournament game from a TV in a surfer bar in Hanalei. We were at one of the most beautiful beaches in the world, on an 80-degree day in March, yet we spent that afternoon watching GU clobber Louisville, and converting aging surfers into Zags fans.
Today, the charms of Gonzaga basketball lie alongside the real treasures of my life – family and friends. Fortunately, during the month of March every year, they converge.